While we are indeed a wholly-owned subsidiary of Korea-based NCsoft Corporation (read NCsoft HQ), we are also our own entity. ArenaNet has not been affected by the NCwest realignment. And indeed, we are hiring: http://www.arena.net/jobs/

Thorak:theurge14: For the love of all that is pure and good can someone somewhere please make a true WoW killer. That 8 year old dumbed down and cartoony piece of crap needs to be put down in the most urgent way.

The thing is, they've been trying to make a WoW-killer for 8 years. Some of them, like Rift, explicitly marketed themselves that way. And none of them have come even remotely close.

It's not that the newcomers don't get a fair shake, even. People leave WoW in droves to try the new game, realize it fails to meet the bar set by WoW, and flock back after a few months. There's usually a dip in WoW subs for the launch, but then it recovers 3-6 months later (outside the normal spike and slow decline pattern you see every expansion).

WoW's success is pretty amazing if you think about it. Imagine if there were only one burger joint, McDonalds. And everyone agreed, McDonalds burgers suck. But there's no other burger joints with any really comparable success, because every new place that starts up has burgers that suck even worse. They might improve the burgers a bit in one respect, like making them less greasy, but they also make them worse in several other respects.

That's not really a good comparison because in practice, there's plenty of strong competitors to McDonalds, and it doesn't have anywhere close to the lock WoW has on the market. But the point is; there's plenty of games that do some things better than WoW; SWTOR's questing/storyline was head-and-shoulders better, for instance. But then it fails on other areas, like player customization and endgame content. WoW still provides the best overall experience, despite being 8 years old.

I'm still playing, and while I'd LOVE a new game, they haven't launched anything that even comes close. I'm waiting for someone to realize that WoW's model doesn't have to be copied, like SWTOR and Rift did, but you can improve on it. The trinity of tank/healer/DPS, for instance, isn't necessary; bosses have to b ...

meatofmystery:as a freelancer in and out of the industry, I can tell you game companies are managed by twats.

As a friend of Mr. Sturgeon, I can tell you that 80% of all companies are managed by twats, twits, sycophants, uncle's-brother's-nephew's-cousin's-former roommate's-golf buddies. It boggles my mind that corporate America still operates and produces revenue.

1) NCSoft does have the power to shut down Guild Wars 2 (but they won't)

2) Guild Wars 2 is a big money maker for NCSoft and their only North America game making any money

3) NCSoft is trying to get out of North America and focus more on Korean games and sales

So, Guild Wars 2 is safe for now. It will not have the lease City of Heroes had though, and as soon as it hints to be losing steam, NCSoft will dump it so they can use the money on something more Korean.

kroonermanblack:More piss mongering from people upset at the closure of CoX, is all I read there.

They aren't going to shut down the flagship product they spent millions bringing to bear, at least not for a year or more. And it's really just incredibly stupid to say so because they took away CoX.

I still don't get why, unless they thought it would force people to buy other games or content or something more profitable, but I can't see how that would even be possible since CoX was a steady and reliable revenue stream with little cost.

Because like someone above said.. morons.. twats (and some other slangs) run these companies. I work in the software industry and am dealing with something similar. My main solution is EOL, has no replacement path for customers, had very little competition, has functionality that is required by law for certain types of companies. The development costs have been greatly reduced and the software is stable. It is a cash cow (albeit a very small percentage of the entire company revenue) but they killed it off. They would have been better off slashing the seat price in half, doing no development and keeping a skeleton crew for support and making 10's of millions more over the next few years until it became completely obsolete.

Point is: Companies sometimes make decisions that make no sense. And make less sense when they are heavily in the black.

Creative Assembly (Total War) got the rights to PC games for Warhammer, so I am VERY happy. Total War: Warhammer!

I would live with a decent RTS version of 40k, as long as they have all the races and are true to their stats.

As to the MMO/FPS concept, you need to allow for more than just the base Marine/Ork/Eldar. Include the option to be a LIbrarian, Tech Marine, Terminator, Scout (just on the marine side). Could even have character who are vehicle specialists. Be fun to be a guy driving a Lemus Russ.

Or be the most holy of broken units, the Wraithlord.

/but I stand by my WAAAAAAAGH.

The first Dawn of War was a great 40k RTS. The sequel, not so much.

As for the Creative Assembly acquiring 40k rights...

[www.reactionface.info image 308x313]

They acquired Fantasy Battle rights. 40k is still very much in the hands of THQ.

/liked DoW2//Space Marine was cool too but peer to peer multiplayer killed it on PC///Blood Ravens table top army because of DoW2

Speaking of how good ANet are to their players, during the Lost Shores event, I got disconnected at the last minute of the boss battle, along with many other people. Today, they gave the AWESOME reward items to those who did the majority of the event but got the short end of the luck stick in the final battle. That event may have been glitched but I enjoyed it very much (never seen such epic battles in a game before) and the fact that ANet is humble enough to acknowledge the issues and offer compensation is awesome to me.

El Uno Magnifico:All players have to be able to stay on their toes with dodges, positioning, and other 'twitchy' movements. GW2 definitely isn't a "you all go stand there and smash buttons while the healers stay back and spam buttons". It's more of a "Holy crap, he's about to sledgehammer me, better dodge my ass out of the way", or, "I'm going to trip up that Thief before he can run away like a pansy then run over and give him a golden shower of justice".

I watch videos for upcoming MMOs that seem interesting and yet know I'll never play them for the simple reason that in every combat gameplay video, everyone is just standing still in front of a mob that is also standing still. I need to dodge now, to watch the mob animations and telegraphs to avoid the damage entirely and not just mitigate it with stats. I need that action!

I played a tank in every other MMO up until GW2, now I play a D/D Ele (I live with my mom/0/30/30 aura/cantrips) and I love, LOVE the sheer amount of movement and combos you can pull off in combat. I rarely die in WvW unless I'm being stupid, and in dungeons I'm usually the last to go down if things go badly. It's a very twitch/reflex oriented class and weaponset.

theurge14:For the love of all that is pure and good can someone somewhere please make a true WoW killer. That 8 year old dumbed down and cartoony piece of crap needs to be put down in the most urgent way.

The thing is, they've been trying to make a WoW-killer for 8 years. Some of them, like Rift, explicitly marketed themselves that way. And none of them have come even remotely close.

It's not that the newcomers don't get a fair shake, even. People leave WoW in droves to try the new game, realize it fails to meet the bar set by WoW, and flock back after a few months. There's usually a dip in WoW subs for the launch, but then it recovers 3-6 months later (outside the normal spike and slow decline pattern you see every expansion).

WoW's success is pretty amazing if you think about it. Imagine if there were only one burger joint, McDonalds. And everyone agreed, McDonalds burgers suck. But there's no other burger joints with any really comparable success, because every new place that starts up has burgers that suck even worse. They might improve the burgers a bit in one respect, like making them less greasy, but they also make them worse in several other respects.

That's not really a good comparison because in practice, there's plenty of strong competitors to McDonalds, and it doesn't have anywhere close to the lock WoW has on the market. But the point is; there's plenty of games that do some things better than WoW; SWTOR's questing/storyline was head-and-shoulders better, for instance. But then it fails on other areas, like player customization and endgame content. WoW still provides the best overall experience, despite being 8 years old.

I'm still playing, and while I'd LOVE a new game, they haven't launched anything that even comes close. I'm waiting for someone to realize that WoW's model doesn't have to be copied, like SWTOR and Rift did, but you can improve on it. The trinity of tank/healer/DPS, for instance, isn't necessary; bosses have to be strong enough to slaughter players, and the trinity emerged to give one player the role of preventing the boss from gibbing other players. There's other ways to do that, though; cover-based systems serve the same purpose. Once you remove the need for a tank, you don't need dedicated healers any longer either.

I'm waiting for a decent TPS MMO with twitch-based gameplay. We have the tech to do it. They just aren't, because it's new and therefore risky.

theurge14:For the love of all that is pure and good can someone somewhere please make a true WoW killer. That 8 year old dumbed down and cartoony piece of crap needs to be put down in the most urgent way.

Nobody can create a "WoW-killer" anybody saying they are are either marketing or deluded. It has way too much inertia. There are two main reasons, both stemming from its early success and long life:

1) No game can ship with the amount of content in a game that has been developed for 8 years since release including 4 expansions. TOR had a problem where people blitzed through the levelling, got border of the little other content and quit (likely back to WoW).2) Millions of people have invested far to much time, money, and emotion into WoW. There are people committed to their characters and will keep coming back as well as people committed to guilds and won't abandon them.

WoW will slowly decline over the coming years until Blizzard kills it off (likely a while after they release their next MMO), but there will not be any single game to break it. Hell, there will most likely never be another game anywhere near as successful as WoW because the market has so many more options now. And in the future, the market will be dominated by free-to-play titles or those with only a required upfront cost.

meatofmystery:as a freelancer in and out of the industry, I can tell you game companies are managed by twats.

The fact that they are managed at all by non creative types is the core of the problem. Games make stupid money these days the New COD BO II has already reached $1 billion in sales, if WOW truly has 13 million paying players that means they are making $195,000,000 PER MONTH. When that much money is on the line you get into a "revenue maximization" mode where no risks are allowed, which kills the creative process and you are forced to turn out a carbon copy of whatever has been proven sucessful in the field, and then game companies are astonished why they can't lure away users sick of playing the thing they copied.

More piss mongering from people upset at the closure of CoX, is all I read there.

They aren't going to shut down the flagship product they spent millions bringing to bear, at least not for a year or more. And it's really just incredibly stupid to say so because they took away CoX.

I still don't get why, unless they thought it would force people to buy other games or content or something more profitable, but I can't see how that would even be possible since CoX was a steady and reliable revenue stream with little cost.

Creative Assembly (Total War) got the rights to PC games for Warhammer, so I am VERY happy. Total War: Warhammer!

I would live with a decent RTS version of 40k, as long as they have all the races and are true to their stats.

As to the MMO/FPS concept, you need to allow for more than just the base Marine/Ork/Eldar. Include the option to be a LIbrarian, Tech Marine, Terminator, Scout (just on the marine side). Could even have character who are vehicle specialists. Be fun to be a guy driving a Lemus Russ.

Or be the most holy of broken units, the Wraithlord.

/but I stand by my WAAAAAAAGH.

The first Dawn of War was a great 40k RTS. The sequel, not so much.

As for the Creative Assembly acquiring 40k rights...

[www.reactionface.info image 308x313]

I never did get the hang of using the Tau. Now the Necrons were fun.

Sisters were just too Space Marine for my liking. The Exorcist pipe organ tank was kinda fun though

What I wanted before the released Dawn of War 2 was the Tyranid. I played the Dawn of War 2 demo, and it was just boring.

Creative Assembly (Total War) got the rights to PC games for Warhammer, so I am VERY happy. Total War: Warhammer!

I would live with a decent RTS version of 40k, as long as they have all the races and are true to their stats.

As to the MMO/FPS concept, you need to allow for more than just the base Marine/Ork/Eldar. Include the option to be a LIbrarian, Tech Marine, Terminator, Scout (just on the marine side). Could even have character who are vehicle specialists. Be fun to be a guy driving a Lemus Russ.

meat0918:wippit: Running a-puck: wippit: Still waiting on World of Warhammer 40k or some such thing.

You'd think Games Workshop would be all over that, they bleed their entire player base dry and keep squeezing for more.

/WAAAAAAAGH!

Got some bad news for you friend.http://www.gamespot.com/news/warhammer-40k-mmo-no-longer-an-mmo-63688 1 0

Like I said... I'm still waiting...

It really needs to happen, but at the same time, why not just have it as an FPS? The only problem I can see is how do you do game matching when 100 people want to be Space Marines, and only a handful want to be one of the other races?

I suppose it's the same problem as SWTOR has, I see more Jedi running around than any other sub class, but at least only have one major enemy.

//So close to getting a 40K army together. I have everything to paint them already....

Creative Assembly (Total War) got the rights to PC games for Warhammer, so I am VERY happy. Total War: Warhammer!

I find Guild Wars 2 pretty fun. Just need a good guild - my friends who are playing it are a couple and play sitting next to each other, and I joined their micro-guild. Kind of a waste of time, as they don't talk in guild chat much and have vastly out-leveled me - I have one character in the low fifties and several more 10ish, while they each have two at the max level.

Still, a lack of subscription fees is nice, and the event-based questing is cool. I'd like to see a combination of dynamic events and story missions, though. Miniature storylines you can embark on rather than your one huge storyline and random events.

wippit:Running a-puck: wippit: Still waiting on World of Warhammer 40k or some such thing.

You'd think Games Workshop would be all over that, they bleed their entire player base dry and keep squeezing for more.

/WAAAAAAAGH!

Got some bad news for you friend.http://www.gamespot.com/news/warhammer-40k-mmo-no-longer-an-mmo-63688 1 0

Like I said... I'm still waiting...

It really needs to happen, but at the same time, why not just have it as an FPS? The only problem I can see is how do you do game matching when 100 people want to be Space Marines, and only a handful want to be one of the other races?

I suppose it's the same problem as SWTOR has, I see more Jedi running around than any other sub class, but at least only have one major enemy.

//So close to getting a 40K army together. I have everything to paint them already....